[Irl-dean] A wee conundrum

[Mark Magennis]

Brendan Spillane said:
> We could have specified one of
> the personas had a disability just like we might have specified that
> they were 44 years old, we just didn't.

It seems to me that adding disability information into a persona  
would be a mistake. It would require you to single out a specific  
disability (or combination of disabilities) and specific degree(s) of  
disability. This goes against the principle of Universal Design,  
which is all about allowing for the wide diversity of abilities that  
naturally occurs across the user population.

Another mistake would be to include a single 'Mike the disabled  
person' persona alongside personas like 'John the early adopter' and  
'Lisa the information junkie'. Again, this would single out a  
specific impairment or combination of impairments and would give you  
a persona based on abilities rather than on goals. Even if you had  
enough personas to fit every type of impairment into, adding specific  
impairments into each persona would tie each impairment to the set of  
goals embodied by that persona, so you might end up with an interface  
that would support early adopters with low vision and deaf  
information junkies, but not deaf early adopters or information  
junkies with low vision. Disabilities are orthogonal to goals.

Eamon's experience of creating a number of 'personas' describing the  
abilities of various people might be good, but I don't think the  
personas he described are personas in the sense of the term coined by  
Allan Cooper which is what I was referring to. Cooper's personas are  
about expressing sets of goals, not sets of abilities. A persona in  
Cooper's sense is essentially a goal-based description with some  
personal info added to make it more lifelike (please tell me I'm  
wrong if I am).

I would love some more input from interaction designers who have  
actually used personas and at the same time tried to embrace Design  
for All principles. How does it work in practice? Are the two issues  
kept entirely separate?

Mark